The thing about a wildfire is it
straightens
you out
real
fast about what's
really
important in life. Some people have no
time
to salvage anything before they evacuate. One
moment
they're homeowners with all the things homeowners accumulate in a
home.
The next
moment,
all they have is the clothes on their back, and a pile of rubble and
ash where their
home
and possessions once were. Don't pretend: you can't
begin
to
imagine
what that's like unless you've
experienced
it first hand first.

Try this on as an exercise. A wildfire is advancing on your
home.
There's
nothing
you can do to
stop
it. You have some
time
to evacuate, say half an hour max (half an hour is
really
quite a luxury: some people have mere seconds). You have a vehicle with
which to evacuate (but
imagine
if you didn't?) in which you can take at least a few
possessions and items you can't
live
without. Here's the
question:
of everything you own, what do you take with you? Quick! The clock's
ticking ...

There was no order to evacuate our area before a brush fire turned into
a monster. That's because this firestorm literally
exploded out of
nothing.
From
nowhere,
it was everywhere all around us even before the first
alarms went out. At 10:32pm on the night of Sunday October 8, 2017 I
felt a soft, warm breeze on my
face.
A breeze in
Napa Valley
is surprisingly rare.
Hawai'i
has its constant trade winds. If you've ever been to
Hawai'i,
you'll know a calm day in
Hawai'i
is rare. In contradistinction, in
Napa Valley
a wind is rare. It was so
lovely,
I
stopped
and threw my head back, letting it caress me. By 12:15am early in the
morning of Monday October 9, 2017, less than two hours later, I could
see fifty foot flames on both ridges of the
Napa Valley
which didn't
look
very hospitable or
friendly,
driven
by the now strong wind. It came on that fast. Now bolt
upright, I realized I may have to
get
out in a hurry if the wind turned and fanned the inferno in my
direction.

The first "No!" came as I
looked
at
photographs
and
photograph albums.
Grabbing the entire cabinet drawer in which I store them, I put it in
the trunk of my car, along with my
children's
artwork.
Financial
and legal
papers
were next. Clothes can always be replaced - a
whole
lot
easier
than last year's tax returns, receipts, insurance policies etc. Even
so, I grabbed three of everything (shirts, slacks, socks etc), put them
in a travel bag which also went into the trunk. A spare
laptop
and
power
cord. Vitamins. Special
gifts
from my
father
and my
mother
... and soon, with many things still remaining in the
Cowboy Cottage
and no room to breathe in my 2007 Toyota Yaris sedan, I'd
reached the
point
where all the things still in the
Cowboy Cottage
could be replaced
easily
if necessary. Then I started the Yaris, reversed it out of the carport,
then re-parked it facing outwards in case an order to
evacuate came (at which
point,
critical
time
may not allow for a laborious
three-point
turn).

As I search for the
words
to try to describe what I saw (all of which suddenly seem so
inadequate), "surreal" doesn't even come close (I later overheard a
man say "It's too late to repent: this is hell!" - which said it
all, at least visually). I don't often
talk to God.
But when I do, it's pretty
authentic.
The thing that was
causing
the fire to spread so rapidly and wreaking so much havoc, is it was
by now a very windy night. Gusts were blowing at around forty five
miles an hour in the
Napa Valley,
and at around seventy miles an hour in the adjacent Sonoma Valley.
At that
point
I just stood
out-here
alone ie by ... my ...
Self
in the cattle pasture and, with ash falling down like
snowflakes
on my shoulders, bowed my head, and closed my stinging,
wateringeyes.

What
I said to God
(what I whispered nakedly to
God,
actually) was "Please
stop
... just
stop
...". It was like I was
listening
my own
wordsspeaking
themselves. They were referring to the gusts. By now, it was quite
plain what we needed was a
shift
in the wind.